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Purpose – Past literature suggests that the performance and turnover of the subordinate are affected by the support, abuse, and feedback provided by the supervisor. In this study, we posit that support, abuse, and feedback in an accounting firm, are in turn, affected by the supervisor's personality, as defined by the Big Five personality factors.

Methodology/approach – We conducted a web-based study with 115 accountants from a top 100 US accounting firm. The accountants completed questionnaires related to the personality of their supervisors along with questionnaires related to the support, abuse, and feedback they received from their supervisors. We analyzed the data using factor analysis and multiple regression.

Findings – We hypothesize that Openness and Agreeableness increase support; Neuroticism increases abuse, but less so if the supervisor is an Extravert; and Extraversion and Conscientiousness increase feedback. Among the hypothesized relationships, all are supported except the relationship between Openness and support. Additional findings are that Extraversion and Conscientiousness increase support; Agreeableness and Conscientiousness decrease abuse; and Agreeableness increases feedback.

Research implications – Our study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the relationship between the personality traits of supervisors and their behavior toward subordinates in an accounting setting. The results of our study can be used in identifying the supervisors who have the right personality for the position, which will likely improve the work environment and reduce turnover.

One particular egregious type of workplace mistreatment is supervisor abuse, which has received extensive attention due to its heavy cost to organizations including up to 23 billion dollars in annual loss resulting from increases in absenteeism, health care costs, and productivity loss. Employees attribute causes to abusive supervision, and these attributions impact subsequent reactions. In some cases, employees may feel that abusive supervision is justified, leading to the reaction of Schadenfreude, or pleasure in another’s pain. In this chapter, we discuss antecedents to Schadenfreude, its role in observed mistreatment, and propose a conceptual model based on attribution theory.

One organizational phenomenon in which emotions undoubtedly emerge is that of abusive supervision. To date, however, very little research has examined emotional responses associated with perceptions of abuse by supervisors. If subordinates believe that responsibility for abuse does not fall on the abusive supervisors but on the organization itself, they might think the abuse is uncontrollable or unintentional on the part of the supervisors. This attribution shift may result in feelings of sympathy toward the supervisor. In this chapter, we suggest that such responses are likely to occur when subordinates are under no-escape conditions. This circumstance can lead subordinates to forgive their supervisor and retaliate against their organization.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine a customer orientation mechanism through which abusive supervision influences retail salespeople’s job performance; and second, to investigate how abusive supervision’s effects may be moderated by the same leader’s use of contingent punishment and contingent reward.

Two studies provide consistent findings. Study 1 used the field survey data from 129 salespeople in 42 retail stores. The proposed moderated mediation model was estimated using the random coefficient modeling technique. Findings were replicated in Study 2, in which data were collected from a sample of 679 US retail salespeople recruited through M-Turk.

Results from both studies show that abusive supervision reduces salespeople’s job performance through lowering their customer orientation. Furthermore, the use of contingent punishment from the same supervisor buffers abusive supervision’s detrimental effect, whereas the use of contingent reward augments it.

The issues the authors address in this research have significant implications for the literature of abusive supervision and retail selling. First, the authors contribute to the abusive supervision literature by pointing it out that the negative effect of abusive supervision can spill over to organizations’ external stakeholders, namely, customers. Previous research on abusive supervision has mainly focused on how abused subordinates exhibit hostile acts directed against the supervisor, coworkers and the organization (Tepper et al., 2017), with little attention paid to abusive supervision’s impact on organizations’ external stakeholders such as customers. This research fills the void by placing impaired customer-orientation as a critical consequence of abusive supervision. Second, this research tests a contingent self-regulation impairment model of abusive supervision and advances our understanding about how the same supervisor’s functional leadership behaviors (contingent reward/punishment) may set contingencies for the effect of abusive supervision on employee outcomes. This investigation clears the doubts about whether the use of functional leadership behaviors along with abusive supervision buffers or aggravates the detrimental effect of the latter. Finally, this study’s findings shed new insights to marketing practitioners, especially in understanding how salespeople may vent their stress on the customers when being abused by their supervisors. Without this in mind, supervisors may not be aware of the consequences of their abusive behavior and may even develop an illusion that such a practice worked. This research shows that abusive supervision can lower employees’ customer orientation, which will hurt the company in the long run.

The findings intend to provide important guidelines for companies to develop effective workshops and training programs to combat the detrimental effects of abusive supervision in the retailing industry. For example, the findings shed new insights in understanding how employees may vent their stress on the customers when being abused by their supervisors. Without this in mind, supervisors may not be aware of the consequences of their abusive behavior and may even develop an illusion that such a practice worked. Another important managerial implication of this research is that the use of contingent reward after mistreating subordinates can backfire. Supervisor abuses, followed by a contingent reward, send an inconsistent signal to the employee that creates confusion and strain. Inconsistent actions from the supervisor also produce ethical tensions that reduce customer-oriented behaviors and a company’s ability to serve the customer (Friend et al., 2020). These training programs are important methods to combat the detrimental effects of abusive supervision in the workforce.

This research draws on the contingent self-regulation impairment model as an overarching framework to unpack the relationship between abusive supervision and salespeople’s job performance. Integrating three research streams (i.e. abusive supervision, leadership reinforcement and retail selling), this study proposes customer orientation as a novel mechanism and sheds light on how abusive supervision interplays with contingent punishment/reward to impact salespeople’s outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the link between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision. From the perspective of moral exclusion theory, the authors examine cooperative goal interdependence and competitive goal interdependence as key boundary conditions to hypothesize and demonstrate the direct negative relationship between low-performing subordinates and abusive supervision. Within the moral exclusion framework, supervisors may strategically abuse low performers when cooperative goal interdependence is high, or competitive goal interdependence is low. Moreover, this study explores the impact of abusive supervision on subordinate’s objective performance.

This research employs two independent studies to examine the antecedents and consequences of abusive supervision based on respondents from a Fortune 500 company located in Anhui province of People’s Republic of China (PRC). Study 1 uses a time lagged, single source survey while Study 2 employs multi-source, multi-wave data. The results support the integrated model.

Across the two studies, the results showed that the direct negative relationship between perceived subordinate performance and abusive supervision was found to be stronger when cooperative goal interdependence was high and when competitive goal interdependence was low. Study 2 also revealed the negative impact of abusive supervision on subordinate’s objective performance and that the conditional indirect effect of subordinate’s perceived performance on objective performance via abusive supervision was contingent on the extent of cooperative and competitive goal interdependence.

The results clearly demonstrate that supervisors are likely to turn to abusive supervision in response to poor performing subordinates but that the tendency to use abuse as an instrumental strategy for improving subordinate performance is dependent on the nature of goal interdependence between the supervisor and subordinates’ goals. The research also shows that although supervisors may turn to abusive supervision under certain goal interdependence conditions, it is not an effective strategy for actually improving subordinate objective performance. In fact, it has the opposite effect.

Workplace abuse, interpersonal mistreatment that occurs within the victim’s work environment, has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this chapter, we argue that problems with the conceptualization and measurement of workplace abuse have thwarted scientific progress. We identify two needs that we believe are especially pressing: (a) the need to consider the construct breadth of workplace abuse scales and (b) the need to test whether the measures of various types of workplace abuse effectively capture the unique qualities of the constructs they purport to assess. To guide our discussion of these issues, we conducted a review of the item content of several workplace abuse measures. We offer suggestions for addressing these and other conceptualization and measurement issues, and we discuss the possible implications of these issues on the study of the hypothesized predictors and consequences of workplace abuse.

Based on the social exchange theory and the reactance theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of workplace abuse from two sources. The study explores the linkage between abusive supervision and co-worker abuse on the targeted employee’s organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and intention to quit as mediated by procedural justice. Furthermore, this study extends understanding workplace abuse consequences by investigating its effects on organizational citizenship behavior directed to individuals and organizational citizenship behavior directed to the organization.

To test the proposed hypotheses, a cross-sectional research design was used. The sample comprised 500 employees working in various private and public sector organizations in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Using a split-sample approach, mediation analyses were performed on the test and validation samples.

The research results showed that procedural justice mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and affective and normative commitment, organizational citizenship behavior directed to individuals and intention to quit. Procedural justice was found to mediate the relationship between co-worker abuse and affective and normative commitment, and intention to quit.

This study extends previous academic studies on workplace abuse by comparing the effects of abusive supervision and the lesser researched source of co-worker abuse on the targeted employee’s organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and intention to quit. It also reports on the effects of each source on an employee’s organizational citizenship behavior directed to individuals and organizational citizenship behavior directed to the organization, as there is limited empirical research within the workplace abuse literate on these two dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether trait and state mindfulness alters the relationship between abusive supervision and interactional justice perceptions, which then predicts supervisor-directed retaliation.

Study 1 examined these relationships among 230 employees using a cross-sectional survey design. Study 2 further examined these relationships among 263 undergraduate students using a scenario-based, experimental laboratory study.

In Study 1, counter to predictions, individuals who were higher in trait mindfulness were most likely to view an abusive supervisor as unfair. Exploratory analyses suggested that this effect was isolated to the mindfulness dimension of being highly attentive to moment-to-moment experiences. Study 2 replicated this effect with state mindfulness (specifically, attention to one’s present moment).

Organizations should consider how mindfulness interventions might not always be useful – and potentially counterproductive – for affecting perceptions of and reactions to some stressful work situations like abusive supervision.

Little research has been done on how mindfulness affects perceptions of and reactions to abusive supervisors. The authors expected mindfulness could reduce the negative effect of supervisor abuse on interactional justice perceptions, as well as the effect of interactional injustice on retaliation. However, within the context of abusive supervision, training individuals to become more mindful may actually predict lower levels of interactional justice, resulting in more supervisor-directed retaliation.

In response to the call for deeper investigation of abusive supervision (Martinko et al., 2013), the purpose of this paper is to examine perceived supervisor competence and perceived employee mobility (an individual’s perception of his/her ability to obtain new employment) to better understand contextual and individual factors that potentially influence the degree of harmful supervisory behaviors experienced by employees.

Responses from 749 survey participants were analyzed to determine the impact of perceived supervisor competence and perceived employee mobility on perceptions of abusive supervisory conduct. A bootstrapping-based mediation analysis (Hayes, 2012) was used to test for mediation by the variables of interest.

The authors found that perceived supervisor competence is associated with weakened perceptions of abusive supervision, and that this relationship is partially mediated by respondents’ perceived occupational mobility.

The data are cross-sectional and were collected with a self-report questionnaire and compiled utilizing student-enumerators. The sample was also regional in scope and lacked information that would indicate if respondents were also supervisors.

These results imply that perceptions of abusive supervision can be mitigated by building stronger competencies in supervisors, which translates into greater individual employee perceived mobility. Human resource (HR) professionals can implement practices to decrease the likelihood of abusive supervisory conduct by ensuring that supervisors are competent in their jobs, facilitating a coaching/mentoring process between supervisors and subordinates and establishing/maintaining an effective developmental performance feedback process for supervisors.

Since perceived supervisor competence is one element of reducing abusive conduct, while also enhancing subordinate perceived mobility, selection and training efforts should focus on hiring and preparing individuals to be effective work supervisors. Enhancing worker capabilities and marketability may result in greater perceived occupational mobility and reduced perceptions of abuse by supervisors.

These results lend support to the argument that perceptions of abusive supervision can be mitigated by building stronger competencies in supervisors, which translates into greater perceived mobility among employees. Organizations may benefit through lowered employee turnover, employees may enjoy more harmonious, supportive relationships with their supervisors and HR staff may benefit by having competent supervisors who do not generate employee complaints and intentions to quit.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

This research paper concentrates on the multifaceted impacts of abusive supervisor conduct on organizational HR measures like talent turnover rates and job satisfaction. Any perceived abuse by a supervisor is reduced in employees who see themselves as having high levels of career choice mobility, and such abuse potential can be avoided by training supervisors to be highly competent in their role.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.